Daddy's Issues @ Ottawa's Undercurrents

Lior directs a staged reading of Merlin Simard’s Daddy’s Issues at the Undercurrents Festival in Ottawa, produced by bigT collective.

Ireen Savoy writes in Apartment613: “Ultimately this was a moving piece that brought to light issues that are not discussed every day.”

Daddy’s Issues is a bilingual play that explores the grief of losing a parent who is still alive. While moving into her new apartment, Anaïs discovers her father’s old phone hidden in one of the boxes. Through a narrative that weaves between monologue and scenes between two lovers, the circumstances of Anaïs’s father’s disappearance become increasingly clear—and complicated! With one foot in her childhood and the other stuck in an iPhone 4, Anaïs will have to mend the fractures of her past to finally feel whole. This play is a love letter to those who choose to stay, to the complexity of trans girl motherhood, but above all, it is a love letter to the deep fractures of childhoods that end too soon.

This bilingual show (French/English) refuses to belong to one language over another. It challenges norms of linguistic separation and, instead, embraces the familiar chaos du real way qu’on se parle.

This is a staged reading of a new work.

Created by Merlin Simard

Directed by Lior Maharjan

Performed by Xénia Gould and Sophie-Thérèse Stone-Richards

Funding Support: Le Conseil des Arts de l’Ontario & Ergo Arts Theatre & Théâtre Action & le Théâtre Français de Toronto.

Friday, February 14th @ 6:30pm

Saturday, February 15th @ 4:00pm